Popery II

Bang on cue (and neatly proving my earlier point), via Islamophobia Watch, we find the secular cavalry, in the person of Sean Matgamna, rallying to the Gates of Vienna:

The difference between modern Islam and modern Christianity is that Christianity, more under the pressure of the modern world for longer, is more schizoid, paying nonsensical, oxymoronic, lip service to both faith and reason. The Catholic Church is what it always was. The difference between that church now and in its quite recent past is not that it has, at root, changed, but that it is weaker.

Absent a few rhetorical flourishes, this is in its essentials identical to the claims Benedict XVI made in his speech: "lip service" the Pope may be paying, but at least the Catholic Church recognises reason - unlike the irrational hordes on our borders. Both claim Islam is uniquely irrational. But both the AWL's guru and the Holy Father have an astonishing lack of awareness if they think the history of rationalism can be written without reference to Islamic scholars. Matgamna continues:

The right to secular free speech, and the right to write and publish freely (under the laws against incitement to violence, and the laws of libel) is taken for granted in the western bourgeois countries. It is written into the constitution of the USA. It had to be won in centuries of struggle.... Today, militant, and even, comparatively speaking, some varieties of 'moderate' Islam, oppose all of that.... Now, we have reached the stage where the revelation, which should surprise nobody, that the Catholic Pope doesn't like Muhammad, or Islam, that he thinks his own religion better, the true religion, and says so, more or less, unleashes organised, obstreperous outrage across large parts of the globe! He is forced to deny that he said what he said, and what he clearly intended to say!

"... I repeat: if political Islam can do that to the Bishop of Rome, what can it not do to secularists, male and female sexual rebels, infidels, apostates from Islam, and socialists in the countries where it is dominant, and in the communities in Western Europe where it is immensely powerful? What does it do? Everywhere it is repressive, often murderously.

A truly unholy alliance.